


The problem of Belonging

by wateryblooms



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Development, Established Relationship, HH 'verse, M/M, Mind Palace, Multi, OT3, Past PTSD, Poly triad, Polyamory, Suicide mentions, an awful lot of cuddling, i still can't fanthom why, jim doesn't like the dog, mentions of drug use, mentions of hurt/comfort, mi6!sherlock, neurodivergent sherlock, od mentions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-06
Updated: 2016-11-06
Packaged: 2018-08-29 09:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8484871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wateryblooms/pseuds/wateryblooms
Summary: Sherlock's lips form a progressive triumphant smile as he watches the change in James's expression; the Professor shakes his head, concealing a smirk, and Sherlock knows he has won.





	

Sherlock walks down a corridor lit by bright neon lights. His shoes slip on the white linoleum, beating the rhythm of his pace; however, he doesn't care about it: there is no one to whom he must conceal or reveal his presence. He is alone.

He walks by the first oak door on his left, barely glancing at it. He rushes slightly, briefly looking at the other ones.

Finally he appears to reach the elected door: there it stands, an old ebony door, rather smaller than the other ones, with a golden brass handle, so tiny that he could completely wrap his palm around it. Sherlock contemplates the door for some time, all thin lips and hands shoved in his coat pockets, then sighs; a soft sigh, barely contained, blown out like smoke.

Sherlock traces the profile of the handle with stretched fingers, titling his head. He feels almost relieved thinking that once this door was locked, for he was really frightened by the idea of opening it (or perhaps, out of fear that something could slip out of it).

He is not afraid, now.

Animated by the thought, Sherlock gathers the courage he needs to enter the room.

The atmosphere is smoky; on the floor an ashtray lays completely full of scattered cigarette butts, one of which is still on fire, dangerously inclined towards the wooden floor; the courtains are closed, but the soft light filters through the cracks, leaving some white spots on the otherwise dark floor.

Leaning against one of the lower kitchen cupboards, a boy, who can't be older than twenty, sits in silence, knees close to the chest. His shoulders are shaken by strong jolts, but not even a sigh escapes from his parted lips, leaving his crying voiceless.

Sherlock slowly and quietly closes the door behind him. He approaches the boy carefully, kneeling in front of him. He touches his forehead to check the temperature, while gently grabbing his wrist to measure his heartbeat.

A harsh laugh bursts out from the lips of the young man, almost contemptuous, in stark contrast to the tears that are rolling down his cheeks: "Checking I'm still alive? Every time you come in here, you're afraid that I'll be completely gone, aren't you?"

Sherlock shakes his head slightly, rolling up the left sleeve of the boy's shirt and taking a look at his forearm: "No. I'm certain, everytime I come, that you're still alive."

"And why?" the boy comptentously murmurs, yanking his arm away from his grip and spasmodically wrapping his arms around his knees.

"Because I survived." Sherlock responds patiently, holding out his hand and waiting. Under his penetrating glance, the boy snorts, but stretches his arm forward, allowing him to look at thin and white scars on his pale forearm.

"Haven't taken anything yet tonight." the young man mutters, wiping his cheek with the sleeve of his jumper. Sherlock looks up at the counter, stuck at ten degrees Celsius. He tightens his lips; he sometimes forgets that the darkness and the cold are not meant to be, in that room, but due to lack of electricity and heating.

"Morphine." he bitterly murmurs, buttoning up the sleeve of the boy's shirt before covering it with the sweater and then, letting it go. It's not a question; more of a sentence.

The boy nods, lips pressed together, rocking back and forth.

"What hurts?" Sherlock asks, clasping his hands, gently.

"Everything." The young man immediatly answers, poking his fingers through his black curls and pressing, in a desperate attempt not to tear his hair. "My head, my chest. I can't breathe, I can't move my fingers. It's cold." He continues to rock back and forth, an hypnotic, obsessive motion.

"The lights hurt my eyes. I started seeing things that can logically only be in my head, _again_. I do not care whether it's real or not, as long as it's useful, but they are hurting me. On the inside. "

Sherlock looks a tear sliding down the boy's cheek, silently.

"They tell me things. Not real things, but I fear that they'll eventually became true, because the worst things I think- they happen. Always. And if I can't tell apart what is true and what is in my head, how can I know what they really think and say? I can't take it anymore."

"The things inside your head are not any less real." Sherlock patiently explains: "You, for example, you're in my head now. That does not mean that you didn't exist or still do."

"They leave." the boy whispers, staring in front of him: "As soon as they see the rot. The machine in my head overheats and starts to smoke and breaks, no, it does not break, but it's about to, and could do any second. And they see all the smoke, all the rot, they see and say, 'that was not why we came', they say 'It was perfect and watching it work was art, each mechanism followed the previous as if it was easy, spectacular, like a concert, and now this'; when they see that the machine is broken, they do not stay. And they leave. "

He's crying again, but this time his voice trembles, this time his whole body trembles. Sherlock puts a hand on his shoulder, stopping the rushing rocking motion, stopping the torrent of words that comes from the boy's lips.

"I know." he admits, defeated. He observes the boy's reddened eyes, the pale blue mirror of his own. "I know."

Sherlock stays silent for some time, while the younger version of himself buries his face in his hands, hiding even from his sight. Sherlock slightly tightens the grip on his shoulder; something inconsistent, offering comfort to a memory. But perhaps it's not his memory that needs consolation, but himself. "It will still hurt. Will for a while, until you can't take it anymore, for real, until they'll barely keep you alive. It will happen twice, and then you'll end up locked in a place, an attempt to stop the pain. It'll hurt even more. And then it suddenly goes a bit better, just enough, and little by little you get used to the mild, continuous sting of pain. You'll believe that it'll hurt forever, that it'll never cease, but that kind of hurt you can manage and accept. And then you do something terrible, and it hurts in a completely different, new, destructive way. "

He takes a breath, closing his eyes. "But I promise you, it is not true that everybody leaves. There will be someone who will see the short circuit of your being, that'll see the smoke and feel the smell of burning, melting plastic, but who will not leave. They'll stay and help you reassemble the pieces until at some point, you'll realize that even the sting of the pain has diminished, almost disappeared. And it will hurt no more. I promise."

The boy doesn't raise his head, but even though he can't look at his eyes, Sherlock knows that he doesn't believe him. And if anyone, at that precise moment of his life, had really made such a speech, he would not have believed them either. It's hard to believe anything when you are filled with pain, when you think you'll not be able to resist until the next breath. The greatest effort was already being able to make it during those minutes, those hours that were needed for everything to turn back within an acceptable level. Until the next peak.

Sherlock strokes away a rebel curl from the boy's forehead, pressing his palm against his head, before getting up. He flashes a last look behind him before closing the door, eyes running to the light between the cracks, a light that's getting brighter. He can't remember if that night he had actually made use of morphine or if he had been able to resist, but he certainly does not want to find out now.

He blinks, waiting for his eyes to adjust to bright neon lights before heading towards the end of the corridor, towards a new door.

This time Sherlock does not hesitate on the threshold of the wide door. He lowers the handle, opening it just enough to peek into the room. This one too is plunged into darkness and the annoying buzz of electronic equipment. Sherlock's eyes are attracted to the only source of light in the room, a small laptop anchored to a desk on which a dark figure is leaning. Sherlock can read in his posture issues with insomnia, in the protruding, vertebrae visible through the skin and even through the fabric of the white shirt self-imposed starvation for more than forty eight hours. On the desk there is an abandoned glass of water still half full.

From his point of view, planning had been even worse than field work. The physical deprivations, extreme situations, he could handle. But being locked in a hotel room for fourteen days to make sure that not a single misstep could incurr in the great scheme of things went against his most intimate nature.

The fingers slide on computer keys, fast and unforgiving. Sherlock knows that those decision are made only by following the purely virtual criteria, abstract logic, as if it was the programming of a game rather than the lives of real people. He has never particularly cared about what is right or wrong; not from the legal point of view, at least. But that's too much even for him.

Soon, that figure will rise, he will check whether the door is locked and the windows shut, and then he will lie in the darkness, sleepless. Sherlock contemplates him, the continuum of an automaton, a corpse that follows the motion by inertia rather than letting go. If someone were to ask him what he thought about deprivation of identity, Sherlock would show them this; eradicated from his life, nothing remains but a pure intellect skeleton and no remorse. A skeleton who might be animated by the need to feel, once again, something.

Sherlock slowly closes the door behind him.

He observes the corridor, palm pressed against the wall, his fingers barely lingering. He considers how he feels, surprised that nausea's not gripping tight his stomach.

Because Sherlock knows that it's over. It's all over, and it doesn't hit him strong and sudden like a slap, but in some way it's just something that already existed within him, something he matured with time and without conscious deliberation.

He won't open these gates for a long time. Both these and another couple that set in a hospital, a garden and a room perched on top of a tower, where there's nothing but sky and empty eyes. And it won't be because he's concerned that those screams, that those feelings could slip out of the cracks, and take shape. They have just no reason to exist out of there.

Sherlock feels finally free from a heavy weight, after confirming those limits. Or rather, the boundlessness of them.

"Sherlock?" a voice calls him, somewhere, echoing through the corridors of his Mind Palace.

He opens his eyes slowly, focusing on a completely different room; in large fireplace, a lively flame casts lights and shadows on the huge living room carpet; the piano reflects that glow, gleaming in a strange optical illusion. In the chair, carefully laid on a pile of messy music sheets, his violin seems to glance at him, inviting. Perhaps he'll play a bit, later.

"Sherlock, did you get lost in your head? Again?" Continues the voice, as if nothing had happened: "God help us, you'd better go to the kitchen before your tea gets cold. And I will not accept complaints like last time if its temperature isn't its ideal one. I warned you."

Sherlock raises his eyes on James, looking insistently at his dark eyes, biting the corner of his lips thoughtfully. With his limbs sunk in the sofa and in the warmth of the atmosphere, the idea of getting up doesn't fall in his short-term plans.

"And what if my tea is the one coming to me?" he suggests, raising an eyebrow.

James looks at him for two long seconds, his arms crossed, perfectly still. Then he sighs: "We're all in the kitchen. Why do you want me to pull out a tray."

"Since when the kitchen is better than the living room?" Sherlock says, waving his arm at the empty space of the couch beside him. Tilting his head against the back, he observes the blurred figure of Jim with narrowed eyes. "It was implicit that you'd come to the living room alongside my tea."

"Look at who is the one licking boots now."

"Why, you have something better to do?"

Sherlock's lips form a progressive triumphant smile as he watches the change in James's expression; the Professor shakes his head, concealing a smirk, and Sherlock knows he has won.

If one can call it a victory, even though it provides an immense benefit to both the parties.

A quarter of an hour later the three of them are comfortably sprawled on the couch, their empty tea cups momentarily abandoned on the floor. They're intent on preserving the mutual heat through close contact and ensuring the finest comfort to every inch of skin that feels neglected.

Sherlock finds out, once again, that he could spend the whole day in that way without feeling bored for even a second. He traces abstract letters on Sebastian's arms, his nose buried in James's collar bone, eyes closed on a vision of total black; he discovers, peacefully, a new horizon. He has always considered the end of his career as an inevitable horror that would incurr against his will or by an early death or body and mind decay that would have made it impossible to continue. But now his days are spent without the desperate need of a distraction, and while he misses his work, it's the most personal part of it, like listening to the strange stories people offered, observing the always surprising mechanisms of the human mind and the passions that demanded action. He misses the satisfaction of leading the wires one by one until the net is unraveled, and then admire the masterpiece that has emerged. He doesn't miss the action.

Or maybe, just a little. But he can contemplate the idea of a time when he'll have had enough of action in his life. When he could leave the excitement and pulsing adrenaline to someone who has yet to experience it, and rather devote himself to order all the chaos that ruled his life, to create something useful to posterity.

He can imagine days when there will be nothing but surrender to the sweet warmth of bodies, to the sound of his companions' laughter, when love has became as a stable source of both surprise and tradition.

Maybe he's just getting older. Or perhaps he's just discovering a reality that he had always chosen to ignore.

"Why that smirk?" Sebastian asks, carefully intent in assuring that not a single curl on his head could be regarded as orderly: "You're looking rather pleased with yourself."

"He's probably thinking about the bloody dog." mutters Jim, prompting a burst of laughter in his companions.

There had been a time where laughing had seemed an exceptional circumstance. Now he thinks that it's rather impossible to stop smiling. Maybe he is becoming dull. No, he definitely is becoming dull, as Mycroft keeps reminding him. But he doesn't care; it's a new kind of boring he could live with. _Domesticity._

He looks at his campanions. If his domesticity includes listening to Jim's stories, and Sebastian's huffs, observing their playful games and joyful childishness, if it includes staring at their eyes for hours, engaging in intense exchanges that seem to make him flying, floating on the surface of the world like an air bubble, in perfect balance between serious and spontaneous, then it was something he could get used to. Or even, something he could get addicted to. If he hadn't already been.

"None of that, do not be absurd." Sherlock whispers, smiling mildly, tightening his grip on both their hands: "I only solved my problem of belonging."

**Author's Note:**

> I've ventured into the dark seas of writing mormorlock.
> 
> For this, I have to thank my wonderful James and Sebastian. I will never able to fully describe what they do to me, but I am certain I'll keep thanking them every day. For everything.
> 
> The fic belongs to a verse called HH. You can find the beginning of the story here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvxxbIKNxt4
> 
> And trace back the timelime through the tag 'verse: HH' in our blog: http://mind-madness-and-rifles.tumblr.com
> 
> English is not my first language, so if you have any advice, please do tell. Comments are more than welcomed :)


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